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Category Archives: Mac History

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Camino is a port of Netscape specifically to Mac OS X. It began in late 2001 when Mike Pinkerton and Vidur Apparao launched a proof-of-concept project to embed Netscape’s Gecko rendering engine in a Cocoa application. Cocoa is Apple’s native object-oriented application programming interface (API) for Mac OS X and is rooted in NeXTstep, which […]

The eve of the Ides of March this year marks 2 decades since the inglorious end of a year-long failed experiment by Apple Computer (among many at the time). Nevertheless, the 20th Anniversary Mac would become a bellwether of the groundbreaking products to come under the guidance of newly-returned “interim CEO” Steve Jobs.

The Growing Windows Threat: Jean Louis Gassée, now the head of product development at Apple, predicted that Apple would maintain its lead in the personal computing world indefinitely. He oversaw the introduction of the critically acclaimed Mac IIci and System 7 (and also several flops) and felt that no company would be able to wrest […]

1986 marked the replacement of Mike Murray as head of marketing with Jean-Louis Gassée. Gassée started Apple’s French division and drove it in a few years to become one of the most successful divisions in Apple. Unlike Steve Jobs’ vision of an information appliance, Gassée hoped that the Macintosh would turn into an open platform […]

There are three different business models in the PC, smartphone, and tablet industries. The most widely used model is for one company to make the operating system and license it to a host of hardware manufacturers. This has given us the Windows market where no matter how badly PC makers do, Microsoft remains profitable.

The Color Classic has been lauded by many Mac faithful as what the original Macintosh should have been. The computer was made available to the general public on February 10, 1993, and was received well by reviewers.

While most early Mac clones depended on Macintosh ROMs to function, NuTek spent four years reverse engineering the ROMs in a clean room in its quest to produce a legal Mac clone. It didn’t exactly succeed.

By the early 1990s, the Macintosh was moving away from its black and white roots and into the world of full color. The last of the compact black and white screen Macs, the Classic II, ceased production in 1992. A few years after that, Apple closed out the last production run of grayscale PowerBooks. With […]

The development of MacPaint 2.0 changed the way the average computer user used his or her machine for all time. Instead of just having a typewriter or number crunching machine, the Macintosh could do work in the visual area as well

Although it has been a while in terms of the life span of the typical child growing up in the computer age, the year 1984 was a highlight. Besides the fact that 1984 was the year the first Macintosh was introduced, the year marked a change in the way computers were used.

Cortland, named for a type of Apple, is a column about computer history, especially Apple and the Macintosh. These articles were written by a student in the United Kingdom who has studied Apple for years and enjoys writing about lesser-known Apple related topics.

2005: With the release of the iMac G5 with Front Row earlier this month, many analysts have hailed Apple’s entry into the living room. However, Apple actually released its first Mac with a remote control in 1993, the Macintosh TV.

Andy Hertzfeld was a key member of the Macintosh development team. He was the Software Wizard behind much of the Mac’s built-in ROM code and the user interface. His goal is to make computers easier and more fun to use. After leaving Apple, Hertzfeld helped co-found three companies: Radius, General Magic, and Eazel. He is […]

After 12 years making Macs using the Motorola 680×0 family of processors (and one year with Lisa before that), Apple discontinued that last 680×0-based Mac in 1996, marking the end of the Vintage Mac era.

Apple addressed some little things with System 7.1, introduced in 1992. The biggest innovation was putting a Fonts folder inside the System Folder. An entire generation of Mac users has now grown up never having had to move fonts to or from the System file using Font/DA Mover.